Lucas Gusher, Spindletop Oil Field

Spindletop was a little knoll of land rising out of a swampy prairie in the southeast corner of Texas, a few miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. There, on January 10, 1901, a new age was born when the first great oil gusher, Lucas Gusher, roared in. This discovery not only opened the vast oil deposits of the Texas Gulf coastal plain and Louisiana to development but also created the modern era of the American petroleum industry. Before Sprindletop, oil was used only for lamps and lubrication. The enormous output of the field led the petroleum industry into a successful search for new uses for oil, for new fields in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, and for new techniques of producing, refining, transporting, and marketing oil. It began the liquid fuel age, stimulating the wide use of fuel oil by steamships, locomotives, and factories. The increased petroleum supply, together with refining improvements also made cheap fuel and lubricants available, permitting the rapid expansion of the automotive industry.

HISTORY

Patillo Higgins was the first to think that the presence of the gas and mineral springs on Spindletop Hill indicated the existence of something more. On a trip east to examine brickyards in Pennsylvania, before establishing one in Beaumont, he noticed that oil and gas were being used for fuel. He visited several oil fields and inquired about methods used in determining the existence of oil or gas. What he found were the same signs he had seen on Spindletop; the odors of escaping gas, the texture of the earth, and the taste of the water.

The oil men he spoke with discussed geology as it applied to recognizing surface indications of oil and they were certain that oil would never be found anywhere except the east. Higgins began to study geology but came to different conclusions than the geologists of the United States Geological Survey, whose books he was using. At the time it was believed that oil only came with rock and that oil-bearing rock probably did not exist along the Gulf Coast. Higgins disagreed, believing that the sulphurated hydrogen gas indicated oil.

He was able to interest several investors through his demonstrated knowledge of geology. His plans went beyond the drilling for oil, conceiving of an entire city with residential and industrial lots, the first meeting of the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company was held on August 10, 1892, but drilling efforts were not begun until February 1893. When it did begin, equipment too light for the necessary drilling was contracted against Higgins's advice. With a hole of only 418 feet instead of the 1500 feet Higgins felt was needed, drilling was halted as money ran out.

In 1895, the company leased the land to the Savage Brothers for drilling, but their equipment was as useless as the first company's. As the financial difficulties of the mid-nineties did not lessen until 1898, Higgins knew he could find no new investors for his project until that time. He then had a geologist sent down from the state office, Mr. Kennedy. Unfortunately, Mr. Kennedy refused to listen with an open mind to Higgins' new geological theories and warned all of Beaumont that oil was not to be found at Spindletop.

Higgins then decided to place an advertisement in a manufacturing journal for the lease of the land, specifying that the person answering should be capable of adequately financing a proposition of some magnitude. received only one answer, that from Captain Anthony F. Lucas.

Lucas graduated from the School of Mining Engineering in Gratz, before entering the Austrian Navy. After visiting his uncle in Michigan he decided to apply for American citizenship. In 1893 he became a mining engineer for Louisiana and explored the salt mines which had attracted his attention. He observed signs of oil, gas, and sulfur in them and developed a theory that they were salt plugs around which oil or sulfur could accumulate.

On weekend excursions, Lucas visited some of Texas' coastal uplifts, including those at Beaumont and High Island. He found good indications of sulphur at Gladys City and Higgins' advertisement attracted him. time Lucas was looking for sulpher, not oil.

At Higgins's advice, he began drilling on Lot 44 in Gladys City, near Higgins' original drill site. His drilling rig was also too light and broke under gas pressure after passing through some oil sand. After a futile search for additional backing, he was introduced to the wildcatting team of James Guffey and John Galey, who got their money from Mellon's interests. Galey chose the site for the new well on the south side of the hill and the north edge of the McFaddin-Kyle and Weiss land Had he gone fifty feet farther south, Galey and Guffey would have been financing a dry hole.

The drilling team of Jim and Al Hammil was sent in by Galey and Guffey. Through their ingenuity and determination, combined with that of Lucas, they were able to overcome the drilling difficulties which had stopped others, until the morning of January 10, 1901.

The mud began to bubble up and suddenly spurted high up over the derrick, knocking off the crown block and falling all around the camp. Just as they were beginning to survey the damage, the mud began to flow again, followed by a terrific column of gas, followed by a solid flow of oil. A geyser of oil was spouting over the derrick, a steady six-inch stream more than 100 feet above the top of the derrick, flowing more than 100,000 barrels a day from a well 1020 feet deep. Nowhere else on earth had such a sight been seen before except for one instance in Russia. The Lucas gusher flowed for nine days uncontrolled until the Hammil brothers devised a method for capping it.

By April 18, six wells had been drilled, each one a gusher, brought in by early investors, D.R. Beatty, the Heywood brothers, Higgins and Lucas. Yet none of these men ever entered into the frenzied stock schemes of the boom town that was to follow.

After the sixth well came in, amazing facts began to be published in usually conservative manufacturing journals. Half of Spindletop's six wells were capable of flowing more than 68,000,000 barrels annually, or 185,000 barrels daily.

Russia had pioneered the use of fuel oil, particularly in powering steamships with oil from the Baku region. Now America would follow and go beyond that example, not only in ships, but in railroads, factories, and the home.

The discovery also spelled doom to Standard Oil's monopoly. Before Spindletop, Standard directly controlled 48,000,000 of the 58,000,000 barrels of petroleum produced annually in the country. Now, the Lucas well alone was producing as much oil as 37,000 eastern wells, six times as much oil as California, twice as much as Pennsylvania, and at least half of the nation's total output. With five additional wells, these figures multiplied. Spindletop could produce more oil in one day than the rest of the fields of the world combined.

Pandemonium broke loose; the population grew from 10,000 to 30,000 in three months. Beaumont became overrun with promoters, saloons, brothels, speculators, and swindlers. In addition to the turmoil in Beaumont, the hill gained a population of its own. When the land boom subsided, things moved toward normalization with three distinct living areas. The most popular was the McFaddin land around the Log Cabin saloon. Men with families chose Gladys City which kept law enforcement in evidence. and Mexicans lived in South Africa, across the tracks to the east.

Derricks went up everywhere, In the summer of 1901 there were 214 wells at Spindletop. Three spots of unusual activity were created by the sale of infinitesimal tracts of land to promoters in the Hogg-Swayne, Keith-Ward, and Yellowpine districts. Higgins, Guffey, Heywood, Lone Star and Crescent, National Oil, and Pipeline kept the wells sparsely spaced on their tracts. As the derricks increased, so did the dangers of fire and gas blowouts. These dangers were aggravated by the wasteful indulgence of promotors who frequently uncapped wells for the amusement of visitors.

During 1902, fires became more frequent. In late October, the Hogg-Swayne tract was completely wiped out by a series of fires. Twenty-six derricks and pumping units were lost in the first blaze which began when a small wooden tank collapsed and oil spilled over a boiler. This fire was almost under control when a second fire began in another section, started by gas fumes ignited by a lantern. By the next morning, the Hogg-Swayne tract was a smoldering ruin. As the fire was cooling, lightning hit a Guffey tank. The flames leaped to an adjoining tank and carried on to the thick patch of wells in the Keith-Ward tract. When the twelve days of hellfire came to an end, only the Yellowpine district stood intact.

Rebuilding began immediately, but a safety committee ruled that as soon as wells were capped, derricks would be removed and replaced with brick housing. This destroyed the picturesque onion-patch effect but gave protection to millions of barrels of oil. By October there were 440 gushers on the hill, spaced on an average of twenty wells to an acre. The gusher for fun and promotion days had ended. But in the boom of the first months, several major American oil companies were formed, including Gulf, Humble, and Sun 011, which owe their success to the men and ideas that grew from Spindletop.

By 1908, Spindletop was in decline. Only a few years before, a 10,000-barrel well was closed as a nuisance, and now the entire field was flowing less than 5,000 barrels a day. The boom towns had moved on to other domes in Oklahoma and Texas. One man, Marrs McLean, continued to search for oil in flank drilling.

By 1915, McLean had studied maps, geological reports, and stratographic sketches of domes, and formed a theory involving off-side sands feeding oil into caprock domes. He had seen oil produced from the off-sides of Sour Lake, Vinton, Hull, and Saratoga domes. Despite Vinton's barren caprock, oil was found on the flanks. McLean reasoned that barren-top domes were the result of contact being broken with the off-side sands. With this idea, he leased and bought land around all of the Gulf Coast domes whenever possible.

In 1920 he returned to Spindletop and began leasing land. He finally was able to interest Frank Yount, owner of the small but successful Yount-Lee Oil Company, who had brought in deep flank production in both Sour Lake and Hull.

In 1925 Spindletop was a ghost town, deserted and desolate, with a few rundown stores and houses in the Gladys City area and a few old derricks as relics of the past. On November 13, 1925, the scene was to change again. Yount-Lee 011 Company's Number 2 McFaddin on the south flank of the dome came in at an estimated 5000 barrels a day. It was the second most significant event in the history of Beaumont and another landmark in the oil industry. What Hull, Sour Lake, and other flank producers had failed to do, old Spindletop would do; it would prove the importance of off-side production on salt domes.

On January 13, 1926, McFaddin Number 4 came in on the old McFaddin-Kyle- Weiss lease, and then Gladys City Number 3, just about 1/2 mile west of the Lucas well, but still there was no great notice among major oil companies. The day Gladys City Number 4 came in on exactly the spot Marrs McLean had staked out before he could find backing, the rush was on again. Gulf and Sun 011 moved back to the field, paying high prices for leases they had relinquished as recently as five years earlier.

The result of Yount's discovery was one of the most prolific oil productions in the county since the first Spindletop boom. Yount's company produced well over 50,000,000 barrels of oil in the first five years and others pumped over 9,000 barrels. The ring of wells started on the south and swung west and then due north up the side of the railroad track. There was never a gusher on the new field but Spindletop had again sparked the imagination of the wildcatters. Its example would soon result in even greater discoveries.